Here's Why ASMR Cooking Makes You So Hungry

Maybe you're not the sort of person who gets hungry easily. You can walk the aisles of the supermarket without so much as a stomach rumble. You can peruse the pages of cookbooks without your mouth watering even once. And yet, one tastefully done TikTok showing a pot of slow-simmering tomato sauce bubbling away is all it takes to set off Pavlov's dinner bell in your head. Why is that? Well, the tropes of ASMR cooking videos — especially those related to sound — are really, really good at making you hungry.

ASMR, or an autonomous sensory meridian response, is what happens when certain sounds or sensations make the skin on your scalp or your neck tingle in a pleasant way. Exactly what sets off this response differs from person to person. Some people are enchanted by "The Joy of Painting", with its soundscape of gentle brushstrokes and Bob Ross' soothing, murmuring voice; others are relaxed by the sound of somebody typing on a mechanical keyboard. Others may not get the response at all—  but that doesn't mean the sound of delicious food cooking can't trigger their hunger. Just as ringing a bell when serving a dog dinner will get them to salivate from just the bell, the sounds of a meal being prepared can make you hungry whether or not there's an actual meal waiting for you at the end of it.

Some sounds that might cause tingles or hunger pangs include chopping vegetables on a cutting board, biting into dense, gooey honeycomb, grinding up peppercorns, or preparing an omelet in a skillet. While there is some overlap with mukbang videos — indeed, there are a ton of ASMR-focused videos where content creators eat from chains like McDonald's and Chick-Fil-A for the viewing and listening pleasure of the audience — these kinds of ASMR videos tend to focus more on process than consumption, all the better to whet your own appetite.

Because taste in food is so subjective, it stands to reason that the sounds which might trigger an ASMR response (or a hunger response) are equally subjective. Maybe you find the sound of a knife gliding through some red onions (maybe so you can pickle them) pleasant and reassuring, or maybe you think the crunch of the onion, or the scrape of the knife along the cutting board, is utterly repellent. And that's not even getting into the loaded issue of mouth sounds while eating, which are a hallmark of ASMR food content but which some who suffer from a negative emotional response to certain sounds, otherwise known as misophonia, find viscerally unpleasant. If it works for you, though, it works for you. And no matter what, every sizzle and bubble lovingly recorded for the sake of food videos online is enough to get the tummy growling.